{"id":1190,"date":"2011-04-18T20:31:12","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T02:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=1190"},"modified":"2011-04-18T20:37:02","modified_gmt":"2011-04-19T02:37:02","slug":"this-wont-end-well-neon-bashes-beloved-timelapse-camera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=1190","title":{"rendered":"This Won’t End Well: Neon Bashes Beloved Timelapse Camera"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sd800_death-600px-7\"
\nI’ve been attaching various CHDK<\/a>-hacked Canon cameras to 24 Hours of LeMons race cars for dozens of races, and they’ve come through the experience scratched and oil-splattered but more or less intact. I figured putting a timelapse camera on a stake at a particularly action-packed corner would work just as well; sure, an errant race car might slide into the camera, but placing the camera outside the area with the most skid marks should keep it safe. Right? Well, that plan worked pretty well… until yesterday in Michigan. 
 
\n\"sd800_death-600px-3\"
\nMost of my timelapse cameras are cheap-on-eBay Canon Powershot A460s, but I also have an SD800 IS<\/a> that I retired from frontline use after its lens got too schmutzed up by heavy use at dusty, grimy race tracks; it still worked fine, but bright backlight tended to fog out some photographs. The SD800 was the first expensive digital camera I’ve ever owned, purchased (on Mike Bumbeck<\/a>‘s advice) so that I’d have something decent to shoot million-dollar Ferrari engines at the ’07 Monterey Historics. According to the diagnostic tools on CHDK, I shot more than 40,000 photographs using that camera. That total includes 99% of the images in the original Down On The Street series<\/a>, most of my LeMons shots prior to the summer of 2010, and the majority of my junkyard photos. That camera was an absolutely bulletproof tool that survived plenty of drops onto pavement, getting soaked by rain, and month after month of getting beat up in my pocket at LeMons races and junkyards (this is in stark contrast to its replacement, an SD1300 that’s just about used up after only 10 months of similar use). 
 
\n\"sd800_death-600px-6\"
\nIts image-stabilization feature meant that it wasn’t quite as good for bolted-to-race-car timelapse duty as the simpler A460, although it did manage to capture some decent images in that role. Mostly, I used it to take BS Inspection timelapse images, in order to create videos such as the one below:
\n